With an Independent Air – Transdiffusion’s ABC AT LARGEhttp://abcatlarge.co.uk
ABC, your weekend TV in the North and Midlands 1956-1968Mon, 19 Nov 2018 21:04:43 +0000en-GBhourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8http://abcatlarge.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/cropped-favicon-abc-32x32.pngWith an Independent Air – Transdiffusion’s ABC AT LARGEhttp://abcatlarge.co.uk
3232114649057Contracts and criticismhttp://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-contracts-and-criticism/
http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-contracts-and-criticism/#respondSun, 27 Nov 2016 11:00:46 +0000http://abcatlarge.co.uk/?p=651To return to the period when The Avengers was launched in 1962, we find ourselves at one of the milestones of Independent Television, the year of the Pilkington Report which lauded the BBC and lashed ITV. Such was the heritage awaiting Lord Hill when in 1963 he was appointed Chairman of the Independent Television Authority for five years. He dismissed the Report with the words:

‘Undeniably the Pilkington Committee has been brutal in its criticisms, so brutal in fact that the Government, sensing that the BBC could not be so white nor ITV so black as Pilkington asserted, had rejected its main recommendations.’

Only a few weeks before Lord Hill took up office the Postmaster-General had declared his intention of opening a second Independent Television service:

‘If all goes well and there are suitable companies willing to offer their services to the ITA, the Government would certainly hope during the autumn of 1965 to authorise the physical build-up of the second programme, starting in the areas of big population.’

On this premise, the Authority extended its programme contracts by another three years, until 1967. Beyond that, said Lord Hill significantly, ‘Present companies and new companies are to apply for any area they choose. All bets are off and there will be a fair field for all.’

On their tenth birthday the ITV contractors were given a package which was unwelcome but not unexpected; the imposition of a Government levy on advertisement revenue, to curb the excessively high profits the companies had been enjoying. But there was also a consolation prize from the Prime Minister; at the celebration dinner in the Guildhall, when he recalled the controversy which had surrounded the inauguration of Independent Television, Mr Wilson paid this tribute:

‘Today, ten years later, on one thing all of us here tonight can agree. Independent Television has become part of our national anatomy. More than that, it has become part of our social system and part of our national way of life.’

By this time ITV was indeed a fixture, with an audience of fifteen million homes, reaching eighty-one per cent of the population.

The companies were paying the Authority £8,000,000 annually in rentals and £22,000,000 in levy out of a net income of £75,000,000. Within ABPC, ABC Television had grown taller in stature than its parent.

In spite of forebodings in the boardroom, ABC Television in its first full financial year had made a small profit for its owners. Thereafter it had contributed increasingly to the total profits, rapidly overtaking then passing the combined earnings of the cinemas, studios, productions, catering, and bowling centres. The trading profits of the group in 1963 totalled £4,035,987, of which ABC Television contributed £2,622,562. A year later ABC Television’s profits had grown to £3,337,185 and the Corporation’s profit had swollen to £5,246,439, while profits from the cinema side had shrunk to £1,982,256. Rewards came to us all in time and at the end of 1964 I was at last elected to the parent board of ABPC. The only financial effect of this was that I was invited to buy 730 shares in the company, at the market price.

The overall scene was changing. Val Parnell, in his seventies, had retired to the South of France. Lew Grade was the undisputed king in full control of the ATV empire. Lance-Bombardier Louis Grade, Royal Signal Corps, as the identity bracelet on his wrist proclaimed; dancer and Charleston champion; theatrical agent and Deputy Managing Director of ATV, had reached the summit and was now at his tycoon peak. ATV had become a one-man concern, even with its 1,700 staff and electronic studio in Elstree and skyscraper in Birmingham. Though there was a succession of personal assistants, assistant managing directors and deputy managing directors, the job of number two at ATV never seemed to be a permanent one.

Lew Grade, Baron Gradeby Cornel Lucas 1996

As Lew expanded his activities, with tremendous energy and courage, developing his other business of providing popular filmed series for the American market, taking over Pye records and assuming control of the theatre side of the business, he took on the tasks of three men. Now he had the big office high in Cumberland House to himself, sitting in the corner where Val Parnell used to be, backed by the handsome bookcase with the English classics in beautiful bindings (though the ones I occasionally took out contained no pages). Lew installed his own king-size desk, full of locked drawers crammed with costing sheets and contracts. In one drawer he kept a wad of unpaid invoices with which he would confront me and I would claim we were being overcharged. In the middle of the desk between us would be a large old-fashioned hand telephone; my occasional assertion that this was bugged was a guaranteed way of making Lew lose his temper. There were times when I thought he was going to explode with anger or excitement, but I learned how to calm him down. His method of pacifying me was to offer me one of those titan cigars, which I never accepted, although if I had kept them all I could have opened a cigar kiosk at the Hilton. Usually we met at the beginning of the day and Lew’s secretary would produce a steaming bowl of coffee with sweet biscuits, which was the boss’s breakfast. A light eater and a teetotaller Lew still had trouble with his chubby waistline and when he did lose some weight he liked to demonstrate that his trousers were getting too slack for him. Tea was another of his social occasions and once he said to me on the telephone with delight: ‘Who do you think is coming to tea with me? Bette Davis!’ The eternal theatrical agent, he was still bedazzled by star names, glittering or otherwise. Our conversations were mostly arguments about money and the buying or selling of programmes. His repertoire was as varied as a cinema organist’s, and he could pull out all the stops – sentimental, threatening, pleading, admiring. His best act was when he would go down on his knees and fling out his arms, one hand still gripping the cigar.

Lew’s birthday was on Christmas Day, and in fact most of the family had their birthdays on noteworthy days of the calendar. Lew’s brother, Bernard Delfont (now Lord Delfont), once explained to me the reason for this. When the family emigrated from Russia and came to East London there was some confusion about their birth certificates. Their mother, Mrs Isaac Winogradsky, could remember only the years when her boys were borm but not the actual dates, because of the Gregorian calendar, and this left them scope to select their own birthday. As the firstborn. Lew exercised his option to choose December 25.

In the agency business Lew and Leslie Grade were in direct competition with Bernard but any real rivalries must have dissolved when they all met at week-ends in the matriarchal home in Wimbledon. Illness reduced Leslie’s activities but there were many healthy differences of opinion between Lew and Bernard. Lew became essentially a television man and Bernard a man of the theatre, but they both had burning ambitions to get into the film business. When EMI finally absorbed the Grade and Delfont agencies Bernard became Chairman of the group’s film production and theatre interests and therefore got in first. Some years later, when Lew became disenchanted with the declining profits of Independent Television he, too, went into feature films, with a blast of trumpets and lavish press receptions. Lew, to me, had always been ITV’s Sam Goldwyn and now he was following exactly in the steps of the film mogul. I used to say that at his television press conferences Lew usually doubled the figure he first thought of; but when he went into films his multiples grew more expansive and we began to read about budgets of fifty million dollars.

Lew Grade, Baron Grade by Ruskin Spear, 1988

In some ways, too, Lord Grade probably was missing the early triumphs and setbacks of ITV, which never ceased to be a stimulant. We still worked in close collaboration on industrial affairs, and always sat together at the monthly meetings with the other companies and with the Authority. As we both gradually hannded over the direct control of programmes to our own able executives and as we yielded our seats of power at the Independent Television Companies’ Association Council meetings and the Standing Consultative Committee gatherings at Brompton Road, some of the zest for television probably faded in both of us.

Even while he had still been concentrating on television, Lew as a one-man operator diversified his activities with his regular trips to the United States to sell programmes, as well as controlling the other ATV activities. This lessening of attention to the ATV franchise in Birmingham and London gave us our chance to move in and ABC Television was able to concentrate on its single objective of improving our strength within the network.

As we analysed our strengths and weaknesses we tried to see ourselves as the Authority saw us. We wanted to prove that we had the potential for a bigger contract and for weekday television. We had the staff, the executives and the programmes, as well as the studios, notably Teddington, which had become the most advanced television engineering centre in Britain outside the BBC. The experiments with colour in the studio had given the staff exceptional experience, well in advance of the Government giving the signal for ITV and BBC to transmit colour.

The era of black and white television was coming to an end. So was the original pattern of ITV. Changes were on the way and new pieces had to be fitted in to the jigsaw.

Lord (Charles) Hill of Luton

Lord Hill was now put in command of the Authority. No longer was the Director-General totally in control, gently guiding his Chairman. Those of us who had worked at the BBC knew well how the course of the Corporation had fluctuated over the years as the controls changed hands between Directors-General and Chairmen. Now, after more than a decade of subtle steersmanship there was a new and powerful hand at the ITV wheel: by joining all the committees (although not always in the capacity of Chairman) and spending four mornings of every week with the Authority at Brompton Road, Lord Hill became as fully informed as his Director-General.

The companies all realised that changes were in progress and we speculated as to where the axe might fall. It was obvious that the deadline for announcing any changes in contractors would have to be decided before the Authority’s year ended in July, 1967. Therefore no-one was surprised when Lord Hill chose the end of February to reveal his hand. He explained that a fifth major networking company would be introduced, in Yorkshire, and would be allocated a seven-day week as well as the existing Lancashire and Midlands stations. London could continue to be split, but on a slightly different basis, with the lucrative Friday evening added to the Saturday-Sunday contract. The London weekday contract would thus be reduced by its most remunerative evening of the week. This new arrangement, a genuine attempt to divide the three central areas fairly and evenly between five companies would eliminate the North and Midlands weekend contract.

Applications were invited for all the fifteen contracts and we were reminded of Lord Hill’s statement in 1963 – ‘a fair field for all’. Now, in 1967, the Authority intended ‘to select companies for the award of new contracts, and not merely to consider the renewal of contracts’. This, I knew, was ABC Television’s opportunity to become a London programme contractor. We would apply for the London Weekend contract, bringing with it the additional Friday evening revenue which would help to subsidise our expansion into weekday programming. We had the least to lose, perhaps the most to gain.

]]>http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-contracts-and-criticism/feed/0651‘M’ appealhttp://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-m-appeal/
http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-m-appeal/#respondSun, 20 Nov 2016 11:00:57 +0000http://abcatlarge.co.uk/?p=638The Avengers was happening at a time when I was encouraging ABC-TV’s parent company, ABPC, to invest a million pounds in a filmed television series. At Elstree studios the corporation had made several half-hearted sallies into TV film series like Flying Doctor and International Detective but none of them had recovered their costs. Meanwhile Lew Grade had followed up the Robin Hood filmed series he had inherited from Hannah Weinstein by making The Saint, with Roger Moore, and Danger Man, starring Patrick McGoohan.

Ten years ago [1967], the economics of one-hour drama series was that the production cost per episode of a series on videotape like The Avengers or Callan, with two weeks in rehearsal followed by two days in the television studios, was £10,000 ‘above the line’ plus another £10,000 for studio costs and overheads. ‘Above-the-line’ means the actual cash expenditure on actors, writers, sets and costumes. In television, artists’ and writers’ fees are based on a single performance in the United Kingdom, with additional payments for repeats and for overseas sales.

A similar script, produced in a film studio at the normal average series rate of five minutes a day, would take two weeks of full studio usage, plus the consequent cost of editing and dubbing music and sound effects. Such film costs averaged £40,000 for a one-hour episode, but this included world rights on actors’ performances and writers’ scripts. The ITV network would pay £20,000 for two transmissions of these films, so the producer would still need to collect another £20,000 from world sales to recover his costs. Earnings on this scale were almost impossible to achieve unless the series was sold to America, either through a network or syndicated to a few hundred individual stations. Only ATV and ABC ever succeeded in breaking into the American networks, although years later the BBC managed to get one or two of its costume play series and documentaries transmitted. Partly because of my contention that a filmed series of The Avengers would bring a year’s work to Elstree studio stages the Board of ABPC finally agreed to let me spend the million pounds on twenty-six one-hour programmes in black-and-white film.

Julian Wintle was a feature film producer with a reputation for producing consistent films of quality on a commercial basis, and we had already gone through a trial run in making The Human Jungle, a series he brought to ABC. Wintle’s particular skill was in the editing of film and his post-production touches could provide the gloss and glamour The Avengers demanded. I put all the elements of a successful television series at his disposal; producers, directors, script editors, writers, designers, and cast, and to all this he added his own skills, aided by his production supervisor Albert Fennell.

Honor Blackman seemed almost irreplaceable until we came across another actress who was both beautiful and accomplished. Having lost our Cathy Gale to James Bond the script editors invented a new character, Emma Peel. The name was coined by a press officer on the ABC series, Marie Donaldson, based on: ‘Man appeal – m. appeal – Emma Peel! See?’

Wintle and I scrutinised all the rushes and the rough cuts of the first three episodes. They were depressing. The actress was not right for the part. The three episodes were not good enough. I had to make a bitter decision. At a cost of the £120,000 already spent, I had to halt production and find a replacement.

Everyone connected with The Avengers and Drama Department came up with suggestions for a new ‘Emma Peel’ and we made screen tests of a dozen young actresses. Many were promising, yet not sufficiently outstanding. Then Dodo Watts, our casting director, asked me to look at an actress she had cast for an Armchair Theatre comedy. The play had just been recorded but not transmitted, and we played it back on closed circuit. The actress was a member of Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company and she was attractive, intelligent, combative and had a fine sense of comedy. She came to Elstree studios for a film test and (for this was vital) to play a scene opposite Pat Macnee. The chemistry worked – they were perfectly partnered. Diana Rigg was signed up on a long-term contract to play the part.

Our overseas sales were then being handled by Bob Norris, a Californian who, as a consequence of marrying an English girl, settled in Britain. Although interest had been aroused in the States, in spite of the rather fuzzy telerecordings of earlier videotaped episodes, there was no sign of a sale to any of the three major US networks. With half the filmed series completed, and half a million pounds spent, the situation began to look desperate. Norris and I flew to New York to tackle the network bosses.

It was the worst week of my television life. Every day we would set forth from the Gotham Hotel with our cans of film, our charts and statistics, and plod around Manhattan, talking to executives and screening episodes to potential buyers. Every evening we would slump back into our chairs in the hotel and hope for the telephone to ring.

Both NBC and CBS continued to show interest but we encountered the inbuilt antipathy to British accents and lack of pace which the British film industry has rarely been able to overcome. Again, we discovered, the programme buyers in top jobs at the network were cautious and unadventurous, because their livelihood depends upon successful decisions and they were judged by results at the end of every season. The “mortality-rate’ of such American network executives has always been alarming.

Then I had a stroke of good fortune. I had known for many years the president of the ABC network, Leonard Goldenson, who had come into television from the film world of Paramount and on several occasions he had visited our company, ABPC, in London. An anglophile, he appreciated the quality of British production in films, theatre and television, and he was most helpful and encouraging. However, sometimes nothing can be more fatal than a boost from the boss, and a recommendation or even an instruction from the front office can be the kiss of death to a hopeful performer or producer. Luckily, Tom Moore, the ABC programme executive, had screened several episodes of The Avengers with increasing interest, and this confirmation of his own judgment proved to be timely.

By Friday morning, our last day in New York, Norris and I found ourselves with two final hurdles to overcome. The films were in black-and-white and the networks were insisting that all series should now be filmed in colour. We talked our way out of this on the thin excuse that The Avengers would have the distinction of being the last TV series sold to America in monochrome. One remaining hope had been to get the series into the network schedule during the summer months, when the regular programme series were off the air. Otherwise the only chance was that our series could be a replacement for one of the other new series which collapsed in the early months of a new season.
ABC said they might be willing to take the first thirteen programmes on this basis in black-and-white. If by some miracle the series succeeded and they wanted more, then we would have to go into colour for the second thirteen. The other difficulty was the ‘unknown’ girl who was starring in the series. Now that a sale was within sight flocks of ABC executives came to screenings of the episodes to inspect the product they might be handling in their respective departments. They all thought her very good, but she was completely unknown. They had never heard of her. She was not even a British star! What the series needed, they were certain, was a bright young American starlet in the part of Emma Peel.

I refused. The essence of The Avengers was its Englishness. That was the quality which basically appealed to them and I insisted it would also be a reason for winning a new audience; something totally unlike any American series. We held on, and Diana Rigg stayed in, to become a television star in the United States as well as throughout the world. Long after, Diana was besieged by all three American networks to appear in a series of her own, built around her, at her own price. Ultimately the vehicle designed for her followed a typical American pattern and could indeed have been played by an American actress, but it failed to be a series of which Diana Rigg could be proud.

Back we came to London, with thirteen episodes sold, to try to convert the remaining episodes to colour, even though we would have to go above budget. Weeks of waiting went by, until the first Nielsen Research audience ratings were telephoned to us. Then came the cable when ABC took up the options for the second thirteen and, with the series already leaping into popularity, an option for another twenty-six in colour. The Avengers developed into a cult in the United States and even today when I go to New York repeats are still running in the small hours.

A happy moment was when the contracts were signed and we announced the sale to the United States, forecasting how many millions of dollars the series was going to bring to Britain. The Evening Standard headlined this as the biggest television deal ever made with the United States. Within an hour of publication a furious Lew Grade was on the telephone to me yelling that it wasn’t the biggest deal. His were always the biggest deals! In fact The Avengers ultimately earned ten million dollars overseas and revenue is still coming in.

The most pleasing aspect to me was that we had produced the series to British standards and not to American requirements. This has always been the difference in attitudes towards overseas sales between Lew Grade and myself. He has always preferred to run two business operations: his ATV franchise in the Midlands, and then his other output of programmes designed specifically for the American market. Sometimes I have jokingly reminded him that he should be concentrating on Birmingham, England, rather than Birmingham, Alabama. My policy for the two companies I started was, first, to satisfy the British audience. If in accomplishing that we could achieve international standards of quality we should be able to sell such programmes overseas. This seems to be the BBC policy, as well, and I think that our moderate success in the United States with programmes of quality has done much to maintain the high reputation of British drama and documentaries in America. Our policy has certainly been justified in the important market of Australia where British television programmes, primarily BBC and our own, have overtaken American products.

The American networks remain a difficult target and at the time of writing Sir Lew appears to have given them up, too, and instead has turned to producing feature films for the cinemas. The gamble of making television film series for the American market has become enormous. The production cost of The Avengers (and I presume The Saint too) rose from £40,000 to £60,000 per episode. Today [1977] it would cost more than £80,000 to produce an Avengers of comparative quality. To make the required minimum series of twenty-six would cost two million pounds, a venture few would contemplate with optimism. Series like The World at War were not accepted by the American networks, mainly because there is no room in their schedules for series of twenty-six one-hour documentaries; but by slogging away around the United States, city by city, our distributors sold this series to 64 individual stations in the principal cities and earned $1,500,000. The remaining outlet is the Public Broadcasting System, to which sponsors donate programmes. Payments are low but prestige is high, and it is here that American viewers have seen and acclaimed British drama series like Upstairs, Downstairs, and Thames’ Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill.

]]>http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-m-appeal/feed/0638Dramas of one kind or anotherhttp://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-dramas-of-one-kind-or-another/
http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-dramas-of-one-kind-or-another/#respondSun, 13 Nov 2016 11:00:17 +0000http://abcatlarge.co.uk/?p=630By 1962 I was fully stretched, keeping in daily touch with our programme centres in Teddington, Aston and Didsbury, motoring to Manchester and Birmingham almost every weekend to see the programmes on the air. Eventually this became too much for one person and I decided to assign ABC’s programmes to a fully empowered Programme Controller. It was obvious that my choice would be either our head of Drama or the head of Features and Light Entertainment. There are always agonising moments of decision like this for an executive who has schooled two top men to be capable of succeeding him. It was the first of several such occasions when I knew that whichever man I chose I would lose the services of the other.

Brian Tesler was appointed Programme Controller of ABC in October, 1962. Before the year was out Sydney Newman had resigned and joined the BBC as their head of Drama, the first ITV executive to be given such a key job in the Corporation. I was satisfied that Brian Tesler possessed executive qualities beyond his existing job, and his skilful interpretation of programme research had qualified him thoroughly for the arguments ahead with the other programme controllers in ITV’s battle against the BBC. Hugh Carleton Greene, as Director-General of the BBC, was now fighting back, determined to regain a half-share of the viewing audience. Greene’s emissary to make the approach to Newman was Kenneth Adam, who had returned to the BBC from Picture Post to succeed Cecil McGivern as Controller of Programmes. Sydney Newman told the press that the Director-General’s brief was to bring the Armchair Theatre playwrights like Alun Owen, Bill Naughton, Clive Exton and Harold Pinter into the BBC fold. Blunt as ever, Newman told the newspapermen that the BBC Drama Department was too big: ‘I want to see how we can bring it down into much tighter groups.’ With him he took some of our staff, including his script editors; others who joined him included Verity Lambert. Her first BBC assignment for Newman was to produce Dr Who; but such is the small world of television that the day came when she returned to Thames (which incorporated ABC), taking over Sydney Newman’s old job and becoming Controller of Drama.

During Sydney Newman’s four and a half years with ABC, Armchair Theatre reached the heights of British television drama although sometimes it also touched the depths of depression. The Daily Mail headlined his move with ‘BBC Signs TV “Dustbin” Man’. This was unfairly sensational but undoubtedly a play series which mirrored life at the end of the nineteen-fifties provided Sydney’s dramatists with plenty of depressing subjects.

Ian HendryAs the percentage of realistic and gloomy plays increased I suggested to Newman that our drama schedules needed balancing with something more light-hearted and sophisticated. I reminded him of the days when MGM produced sparkling comedies tailored for their contract stars like Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy and Norma Shearer, elegantly dressed and in fashionable settings. Why couldn’t we make a series based, for instance, on The Thin Man, with characters like those made famous by William Powell and Myrna Loy? This suggestion appealed to the ever-receptive Sydney and he came back quickly with a proposal. Seeking popular new series he had coined a title, Police Surgeon, which seemed to have the elements of box office appeal. In spite of the performance of a compelling young actor, Ian Hendry, the first episodes had made little impact. We looked at a newly completed episode in which Ian Hendry acted with Patrick Macnee, an actor who had recently returned to Britain after a few years in Hollywood. In the episode Macnee’s girl friend had been murdered and the two men vowed to avenge her death.

Sydney Newman’s proposal was that we should team the two actors, Hendry again as a doctor and Macnee as a man-about-town agent. A girl was needed to match them and as we could not decide upon the most suitable of two actresses we alternated Julie Stevens, a young contract actress ABC had found in Manchester, with a former Rank starlet who had matured into an accomplished actress, Honor Blackman.

Mrs Gale and Mr SteedThe first series of The Avengers began in January 1961. ATV’s refusal to network it gave the programme an unexpected opportunity for what could be called a provincial try-out, the method by which Charles B. Cochran used to polish his revues in Manchester before bringing them to London to confront West End critics and audiences. The first year’s run was interrupted by a long Equity strike and it was not until May 1962 that we were able to launch the series in what became the familiar format. Ian Hendry had decided that he had no wish to be type-cast in a regular series and he dropped out, although he continued to appear often for ABC in important plays. Honor Blackman’s stylish authority was exactly right for the part of Cathy Gale. Julie Stevens went off in the opposite direction, to become one of the regular presenters in a BBC children’s programme.

The Avengers unit quickly became a dedicated team, with an eager young scot, John Bryce, as producer working closely with Richard Bates as story editor. Patrick Macnee was dandified in Edwardian style, wearing braided suits and embroidered waistcoats, plus a curly bowler hat and an umbrella-swordstick. Macnee did not carry a gun but was always ready to use un-gentlemanly tactics in dealing with rough customers. Michael Whittaker and Frederick Starke designed clothes for Honor Blackman, and her man-tailored suits, high boots, leather jerkins and cat suits started fashion trends which became a trade-mark of the programme. Richard Bates (a son of the author H.E. Bates) had dozens of writers at one time or another working on the series, but the main scripts he selected came from Roger Marshall, Brian Clemens, Eric Paice and Malcolm Hulke.

Cathy GaleProduced on videotape at Teddington studios, The Avengers became a national hit once ATV gave in and we were allotted air time in London. Overseas interest was considerable and our film company’s distributors in the United States were optimistic of its chances there. The handicap was that there was no satisfactory electronic method of transferring British 405-line television videotapes to the American standard.

The success of The Avengers was due to its appeal on two levels, first as a fast-moving thriller and, secondly, its tongue-in-cheek impudence and way-out situations which captured the more selective viewers. I tried to stimulate our Elstree film people to make a feature film of The Avengers or, at least, to put Honor Blackman under contract because of her obvious feature film appeal, but without response. Instead Harry Saltzman stepped in and signed up Honor for his James Bond series and she made an instant hit as Pussy Galore.

]]>http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-dramas-of-one-kind-or-another/feed/0630Building up ABChttp://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-building-up-abc/
http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-building-up-abc/#respondThu, 28 Jul 2016 14:13:30 +0000http://abcatlarge.co.uk/?p=61The companies’ first scramble had been to get on the air. All the days of every week were needed to get studios into shape, to move up in the priorities line for equipment, and to take on staff by the hundred, even before the all-important question of what actual programmes to produce had been finalised.

Each of the four contractors had individual problems. One of mine at ABC was how best to provide a two-day service, limited to fifteen hours of studio programmes but stretched beyond that by the permitted use of outside broadcasts and religious programmes.

Saturday was inevitably an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the BBC at its entertainment best, with no current affairs or equivalent ‘soft spots’ in their schedules. The officially limited hours of broadcasting meant that Saturday afternoons could only be filled by outside broadcasts, which entailed the provision of three to four hours’ coverage of sporting events on the calendar and called for three mobile units in the North and Midlands, reinforced by ATV’s two units in London. At best we could only hope to break even with the BBC and its highly experienced mobile units scattered over many regions, and against the Corporation’s long-established contracts with sports promoters.

Nor did Saturday sport have much appeal to advertisers, whose marketing interest was mainly in women – at that time women were minority audiences for sport. To attract women viewers we eventually introduced all-in wrestling and this muscle-flexing was placed strategically at 4 p.m. to amass audiences for the studio entertainment programmes beginning at 4.30 or 5 p.m. Many other devices were tried, without much response, to entice women to the sporting afternoons, including health and slimming exercises for women, with Birmingham housewives in the studio being put through a keep-fit course by the handsome ITN newscaster, Huw Thomas. Gradually we strengthened the programme until it grew up into World of Sport with Eamonn Andrews as the central figure, who already had a considerable following on radio sports programmes.

Then began the contest for the Saturday night audience. Father had to yield the switch to the rest of the family, and my calculation was that if we could attract the battalions of teenagers before they went out on their Saturday sprees we could then hold on to mother and the rest of the family. A young producer, Jack Good, who had been working for the BBC, brought into my office a new formula for pop music, complete with drawings and a model of the elaborate set he wanted to use for a most lavish show, with bands, dancers, pop groups and singers. This was Oh Boy!, an instant hit with its intended audience, although little more than a curiosity for older viewers. Many young stars were launched on their television careers here, like Cliff Richard (twenty-five guineas was his first fee) and we followed up with other shows in this idiom. We once made the mistake of taking the casually dressed Marty Wilde and transforming him into a debonair young man with clipped hair, with a corresponding loss of audience.

We changed the pattern and broadened the appeal of our Saturday programme by bringing in Philip Jones to produce Thank Your Lucky Stars, a visual disc-jockey presentation, at Aston Studios, Birmingham. This ran for years and was an early launching pad for many young performers such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Gerry and the Pacemakers. Starting from here Philip eventually became our Director of Light Entertainment and perhaps the most consistently successful television producer of light shows.

The peak hours of the week for ITV were achieved on Sunday evenings, when ATV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium was followed by the only weekly play series then on British television, ABC’s Armchair Theatre and still the best remembered. Our plays began in July, 1956, with The Outsider, with Adrienne Corri, David Kossoff and Raymond Huntley, and was produced under the most adverse conditions in our newly converted ABC Didsbury theatre in Manchester. Casts were assembled and rehearsed in London, then brought by train to Manchester on Saturdays. Because the studio was occupied all day on Saturday only Sunday remained for rehearsing with cameras and sound, culminating in the live transmission at nine o’clock. Then the actors would dash to the station for the overnight sleeper back to Euston.

This chapter could be filled with the comic and sad stories of those crowded Sundays: Ted Kotcheff trying to produce an elaborate version of Emperor Jones with stage hands visibly holding up the scenery; actors being pulled out of the pub across the road to come in on their cues; the evening I stayed at home for once in Gerrards Cross to watch an Armchair Theatre production and was rung up by the General Manager, Gerry Mitchell, crying, ‘One of the actors has just died and is lying on the studio floor; what shall I do?’ and I could only answer – ‘Get him out of the picture and get on with the play.’ Somehow the other actors filled in the missing lines but the end of that play must have been even more perplexing than usual. There was the night when we had Sarah Churchill acting in The Heiress and afterwards, with a few of us in her bedroom at the Midland Hotel, she sprawled on her bed to telephone to ‘Daddy’ and bask in his vociferous praise.

The establishment of Armchair Theatre was a fine accomplishment by Dennis Vance. Not only did he choose, produce and cast the plays but he directed many himself. There was much enterprise and boldness: Gracie Fields in her first play The Old Lady Shows Her Medals; Mai Zetterling and Tyrone Power in Strindberg’s Miss Julie; Hugh Griffiths in a play commissioned from J.B.Priestley, Now Let Him Go; Ann Todd in Lady of the Camellias; Franchot Tone, Susan Strasberg and Ann Sheridan in Philip Saville’s television version of Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life.

Article source: With an Independent Air by Howard Thomas (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977)

]]>http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-building-up-abc/feed/061The pace of dramahttp://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-the-pace-of-drama/
http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-the-pace-of-drama/#respondThu, 28 Jul 2016 14:12:03 +0000http://abcatlarge.co.uk/?p=64The pace grew too much even for Dennis Vance, because he was also busy on other programmes for us, and, restless as ever, he was anxious to launch into filming drama series for television. On BBC Television I had been enthralled by a play imported from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Flight into Danger written by a journalist, Arthur Hailey. Dennis Vance and I made enquiries and found that the producer was Sydney Newman, a man with a reputation for choosing topical subjects and then schooling writers to turn these into television scripts.

Sydney Newman flew over from Canada to have lunch with Dennis Vance and myself at the Ivy restaurant one Christmas Eve and within a few months he joined us at ABC. He built upon the foundation laid by Vance to establish Armchair Theatre as the most distinguished series in Britain’s television drama output, outwitting the BBC at one of its prime achievements, and corralling a mass public audience for Sunday night plays. In the 1959-60 season. Armchair Theatre plays were in the top ten programmes for thirty-two weeks out of thirty-seven. The dynamic and abrasive Sydney had a difficult first year in Britain because the press were suspicious at first of his flamboyant character and his firmly enunciated policy to concentrate on original writing for television. He declared that he would choose contemporary subjects, act as midwife to new writers, produce new directors, and change the course of British television drama. All this he accomplished. At subsequent press conferences the television reviewers began to turn up with their pockets bulging with their own playscripts, to be left behind for the maestro to read.

After two years of Armchair Theatre it became increasingly difficult to induce the stars we needed to travel to Manchester, particularly if they were working in the West End and had to make an overnight journey. By then, too, videotape recording was changing the whole way of television life, enabling us to record plays and reduce the hazards of live performance. Considerations like this made us decide that the time had come to transfer some of our major productions to London, with Manchester studios continuing to be the heart of our live television operation. In November 1958 I inspected the empty film studios of Warner Brothers, at Teddington, near Twickenham, in Middlesex, and recognised at once that the compact four acres of buildings would be exactly right for television conversion. Within four months the staff moved in to produce Armchair Theatre at its London base.

Already we had gained a reputation for excellence in design, mainly through the efforts of Timothy O’Brien, recruited from Rediffusion. (He became Associate Designer for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.) Awaiting Sydney Newman in our Drama Department were such capable directors as Philip Saville, George More O’Farrell, John Nelson Burton and Ted Kotcheff, the young Canadian I had taken on after he had come to England to direct one play for us.

Sydney Newman soon began to team his directors with the writers he had commissioned. Harold Pinter, Angus Wilson and Alun Owen wrote their first television plays for ABC. Clive Exton brought us his third play and became one of our earliest contract playwrights. Peter Luke and Irene Shubik learned the trade of script editors. Other names joined the roster, John Kruse, Ray Rigby, the Canadian writer Mordecai Richler, Malcolm Hulke and Eric Paice.

More directors were brought in to match. Newman lured back home to Britain two directors, celebrated today, who were working respectively in Hollywood and Canada, Alan Cooke and Charles Jarrett. We had Harold Pinter acting in his own first play for television, A Night Out, with a cast including Vivien Merchant, Tom Bell and Arthur Lowe, directed by Philip Saville. This domestic satire was broadcast in May 1960 and came out top of the National Top Ten that week.

ABC’s contribution to drama was not confined to television. In those early days, television had borrowed heavily from the theatre, not only actors and directors, but many plays. Now came an opportunity to repay and plough something back in return. We had established an Arts and Sciences Awards Fund, and high on our list were financial contributions to repertory theatres in the North and Midlands. Yet I was concerned because so many of the cheques we handed over to these theatres went into bricks and mortar, paying for seating, bars, and building maintenance. Hardly anything went into the work of a repertory company itself. Therefore I worked out an entirely new scheme for the training of new regional theatre directors, with ABC subsidising the supply of young assistant directors to theatres in our regions, at the rate of six every year.

In the first year of the scheme, 1960, we attracted 190 applicants, all being interviewed by the Drama Department. The twenty most promising candidates were brought to London for the day, first to be questioned by a panel of experts, and then allocated to the theatres, whose directors and chairmen were watching all the interviews, eager to acquire the most suitable young man or woman for their theatre. The chosen six were then given a year’s experience in the theatre, learning about plays, actors, design, lighting, management and box office. No strings were attached to the appointments, and at the end of the year every trainee was free to go into the theatre, television or films. At the time of writing eighty-five trainees have passed through the scheme, which is now run on a national basis by Independent Television. Most of them stayed in the theatre and became stage directors both in Britain and overseas. Some found fame, among them Trevor Nunn as director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Kenneth Loach as a film director, and John Cox, opera director at Glyndebourne.

Article source: With an Independent Air by Howard Thomas (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977)

]]>http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-the-pace-of-drama/feed/064Adding colourhttp://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-adding-colour/
http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-adding-colour/#respondThu, 28 Jul 2016 14:11:34 +0000http://abcatlarge.co.uk/?p=67With ABC established as a leading company in drama and with the largest and busiest outside broadcast department in ITV it was still necessary to improve our studio light entertainment. The mobile shows like David Southwood’s Holiday Town were very much a drum-banging and public relations exercise, touring our regions, with McDonald Hobley signed up from the BBC (at a then sensational fee of £100 a week) to introduce seaside beauty queens and muscle-men contests, to the lively music of Joe Loss and his Orchestra.

We were still experimenting with entertainment and many unpretentious new programmes were tried out, like Dickie Henderson in a new-talent show. Bid for Fame, and Number Please, with viewers telephoning Ray Ellington and his band for request tunes, but we had not yet reached the highest professional standards in producing variety shows and situation comedies. Perhaps this was why ATV were unwilling to network our light entertainment into London and why Val Parnell continued to urge me to contract out to his company the provision of our light entertainment. There was one comedy series which they flatly refused to network, simply on the grounds that they had no room for it in their London schedules. This format proved to be the predecessor of many successful sophisticated television shows and was indeed more suited to London audiences than any other region. Called After Hours it was a late-night revue, directed by Dick Lester, before he became one of Britain’s leading feature film comedy specialists. Michael Bentine headed a zany cast which included Dick Emery and Clive Dunn. It was one of the funniest shows that London has never seen.

Although ATV’s variety shows were so professional they conformed very much to proven formula; almost their only innovations were American importations, usually in the form of quiz shows. It was hardly surprising that there was restlessness among ATV’s brighter and more ambitious young producers and directors. One day I had a visit from their best variety producer, Brian Tesler, who had won his way to Oxford, been trained by the BBC and was then offered a choice of jobs, out of which he chose to join the Variety Department. He had recognised the new opportunities in ITV and had joined ATV in its early days; but now, after three years, he was ready to make a move. I think he recognised that ABC was the most willing of the programme contractors to experiment and to break new ground. I asked him how old he was.

‘Thirty,’ he replied.

‘That’s getting on, for a variety producer,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it time you settled down behind a desk, and told the others what to do? Would you like to join ABC as Supervisor of Features and Light Entertainment?’ It was Brian Tesler’s first step towards executive control and it was only a question of time and experience before he became a leader among the programme men of ITV.

Brian Tesler, Howard Thomas and Sydney Newman

Like most of those who decide to abandon the pleasures of directing programmes, Brian Tesler found it difficult to give up the studio floor and the control room, for I had insisted that the new job was so demanding that he would not be able to produce personally any of our programmes. Yet there was one production he wanted to handle, a plea with which I had sympathy, and this turned out to be his first and last for ABC. Sammy Davis Junior had never appeared on a British television programme and we managed to sign him up for his debut in Britain. Brian admired the many skills of Sammy, and this was the show he wanted to produce himself. It turned out to be a difficult production with an exacting artiste, especially when they decided to make part of the show as an outside broadcast from Battersea Park, with Sammy Davis dancing ahead of a party of cockney kids like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

After long and painful effort Sammy Davis Comes to London looked splendid on the screen, but I had the impression that by then Brian Tesler had no regrets about picking up the baton. Probably he faced such temptation again when we secured the services of Frank Sinatra for his first-ever television performance in Britain, at London’s Festival Hall, but by then he had reliable lieutenants like Philip Jones to whom he could entrust the big assignments.

Instead of being handicapped by the sprawl of our widespread facilities Brian Tesler was capable of turning them to advantage. Just as he had deployed the outside broadcast units at Battersea Park he now began to recruit them for elaborate productions in venues like ABC’s big Blackpool theatre. He recognised the value of responsive North Country audiences, who came out to enjoy being entertained, and used Didsbury studios for shows needing fans out in front, like Hughie Green’s Opportunity Knocks, which Brian Tesler launched.

Above all, there were the new Teddington studios which were still being perfected. With Tesler and the gifted engineer, Howard Steele, we had two of the most professional young men in broadcasting working harmoniously together to design studios, select equipment and plan control rooms which were built to the most exacting standards of both producers and engineers. One of the absurdities I had encountered at the BBC had been the wide gap between programme makers and the engineers, the result of early power battles in the Corporation. At ABC I reversed this practice and the close collaboration between Tesler and Steele was the key to such integration throughout our company, with the result that Teddington studios became a showplace for the ITA.

Producers and engineers were able to tackle problems together, coming up with such innovations as the press-button panel to provide instant special effects (dissolves, wipes, mixes, geometric designs, etc.) which in the film processing laboratories used to take so long and cost so much. Again, when I asked for a method of separating speech tracks from videotape recordings so that we could dub foreign-language versions, the engineers developed the Medway system now used universally. The Teddington engineers’ greatest advance, though, was achieved in colour television, as a result of which Britain gained a world initiative in colour development. From the moment we took over and planned Teddington studios every technical operation was designed with colour in mind, even though it then seemed far away.

At one time the United States had been ahead of Britain with their NTSC system. I had been to New York to see some of the early CBS experiments, particularly the mechanical colour wheel, but ultimately RCA and NBC produced the system which all the networks adopted. BBC engineers had made many trips to the American networks and to the electronic colour laboratories at Princeton and elsewhere, and they seemed to have settled un-questioningly for this same system to be adapted to British 405-line standards.

The new generation of British television engineers was not so complacent. Our trio of Greenhead, Steele and Samson sought permission to explore alternative colour systems which were under experiment in France, Germany and Russia. As early as 1961 Teddington produced the first videotape recordings of the new French SECAM 625-lines colour television system. A month later we offered the first public demonstration of a live colour television studio, and ABC provided the colour cameras, lighting and production crews and programmes, in collaboration with GEC, and using both the American and the French systems. In March 1962 the SECAM (French) signals were networked from Teddington to Birmingham and to Manchester for compatibility trials and in June that year we were able to provide signals for the ITA’s first colour broadcast and the world’s first high-power transmissions of SECAM colour. Soon we were demonstrating the latest developments to the European Broadcasting Union and, in April 1964, we gave the Technical Sub-committee of the Government’s Television Advisory Committee (on their first ever visit to an ITV studio) a demonstration of colour conversion from one system to another.

By then we had begun to develop the German 405-line PAL colour, and in January 1966, we gave the first demonstration of the Russian NIR system.

I soon found that politics entered as much into television engineering as into everything else. The French Government was now trying to sell the merits of its SECAM colour system to the Russians and the French manufacturers asked me if Howard Steele could go to Moscow on their behalf to demonstrate what ABC had accomplished with SECAM. Shortly afterwards I received a discreet message from the Foreign Office suggesting it might be unwise for Britain to become too closely identified with any one colour process. Reluctant for ABC to be a pawn in political manoeuvres I encouraged our engineers to give equal attention to the development of the German PAL, but even without this prompting they were finding already that the PAL system was much more robust than the more delicate French SECAM.

All systems were put to the test in an historic meeting of television engineers in Oslo in May 1966 when ABC Television demonstrated the respective merits of NTSC, SECAM and PAL.

There was an overwhelming preference for the solid reliability of PAL and in the course of time the German system was adopted by Britain, then increasingly in Europe and other parts of the world. France clung doggedly to SECAM and De Gaulle eventually succeeded in selling it to Soviet Russia. The one country which could not make up its mind was Italy and after ten years of wavering the final choice looked like being PAL.

It was surprising that the other programme companies left us a clear field on this experimentation. The prestige of ABC’s engineers was further enhanced in the autumn of 1966, when Teddington staged demonstrations of 405-line VHF PAL colour television on behalf of the IT A to members of Parliament, representatives of the national and technical press, executives of the BBC and ITV, and senior staff and engineers of the GPO.

The final decision to adopt PAL for Britain was taken immediately after a live programme in this colour process had been transmitted from Teddington to the Authority’s headquarters in Brompton Road, for the benefit of the Postmaster-General and his expert advisors. Enthusiasm for colour spread throughout ABC and as the final stages of the programme contract drew to a close ABC was not only years in advance of the other companies’ engineers but the programme department had also been able to gain practical experience of the new colour requirements of lighting, design and costume.

Article source: With an Independent Air by Howard Thomas (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977)

]]>http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-adding-colour/feed/067Network scrapeshttp://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-network-scrapes/
http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-network-scrapes/#respondThu, 28 Jul 2016 14:10:02 +0000http://abcatlarge.co.uk/?p=70The adventure of colour had not diverted our engineering department from its more urgent assignment of converting the vast Studio One into the newest and most technically advanced television studio in Britain. The electronic lighting system, the control room devices for sound and picture, together with the light and airy rehearsal rooms adjoining the studios had provided Sydney Newman and his producers and designers with technical flawlessness for Armchair Theatre to supplement their creative achievements. Offspring (or “spin-offs’ as they were called) from individual plays began to generate drama series. The play, A Magnum for Schneider, fathered the Callan series.
‘Callan’

So that our drama producers would not forget the North and Midlands audience at our base, I provided their offices with Lowry prints. When we first opened ABC in Manchester I had commissioned a ‘local’ artist to paint a typical Manchester scene for us every year, and my choice was L.S. Lowry whose price then was between £150 and £200 a picture. One day he came to see his Salford painting hanging in my London office in Hanover Square. I told him that all I missed was the television aerials on the houses. At once, he took a brush from his inside pocket and painted an ITV aerial on one of the houses! It was exhibited in the Lowry exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1976.

Brian Tesler had been able to attract into ABC a new school of entertainment producers and directors, and to produce variety shows and situation comedies to match anything the BBC or ATV could offer. That rarest of all the species, writers of comedy, had also been drawn into ABC and we had more of them under contract than anyone except the BBC. With Brian Tesler’s personal reputation and his constellation of directors and writers, it became less difficult to entice the cream of that most nervous and uncertain group of all, the comedians. To move to other spheres of entertainment they needed to have exceptional confidence in the programme makers and their immediate bosses. With ABC programmes now offering a vigorous challenge to ATV’s domination of entertainment we began to bill such stars as Benny Hill, Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, Max Bygraves, Bob Monkhouse, Mike and Bernie Winters, and Sid James.

Tommy Cooper

At last ABC Television had accumulated the strength to reject and replace ATV programmes which did not reach up to our requirements. The day came when Val Parnell and Lew Grade once again threatened to withhold the London Palladium show and I called their bluff by refreshing the Sunday night peak hour with our own variety shows from the Blackpool Hippodrome. We retained the television audience, pleased the critics, and started a new relationship, based on equality, with ATV. Nevertheless, there were times when the inter-company battles grew bitter. The heaviest blow inflicted on ABC was when ATV deliberately undermined the success of Armchair Theatre by demanding alternation on Sunday nights with a play series from their own drama department, which was already contributing plays to the weekday network. As a London contractor ATV had the power not to transmit Armchair Theatre in London, a severe hardship for us, because we could never hold on to our distinguished writers and directors if their work was to be limited to the provinces and not displayed in the great shop window which is London. Also, ABC had now created an original new drama series, in advance of its time, which ATV again refused to network to London, objecting to our incursion into the field of the drama series. For a long time The Avengers remained unnetworked but its reputation and its ratings became so compulsive that ATV was eventually forced to give in.

I criticise the weakness of the Independent Television Authority at that time for their failure to intervene, and to insist that ATV give a fair showing to network programmes of national quality. On weekdays, Granada’s deal with Rediffusion had guaranteed them a London showing for most of their programmes, though even then it took a long time to promote Coronation Street (a local programme) from Granadaland to London and the national network. I have always supported Sir Robert Fraser as the true architect of ITV and the man most responsible for its eventual success, but there were moments of weakness when he faced the London contractors. Perhaps he was too susceptible to the strong-arm tactics of Val Parnell and the beguiling persuasion of Lew Grade. He should not have permitted them to sabotage the most respected play series in Britain, Armchair Theatre, and thus reduce the power and prestige of ITV’s Sunday night.

Possibly Bob Fraser was susceptible to a change because some of the more provocative Armchair Theatre plays aroused protests in the press, at the Authority and indeed in my own boardroom. At that time the favourite derogatory phrase about Armchair Theatre was ‘kitchen sink drama’. Many of the plays I personally found unsatisfactory, irritating or unjustifiable but I have always tried to give producers the freedom they wanted. I had an arrangement with Sydney Newman that one out of every four plays should be experimental – which in effect probably meant losing audiences in the process. Often Sir Philip Warter would telephone me at home to complain about the themes and attitudes of Armchair Theatre plays, but I was usually able to claim that his opinions were directly opposite to those of the public; for the plays he liked earned poor ratings and the ones he condemned were generally our best successes.

Many times I clashed with the Authority in defence of some of the plays before they were broadcast, because we had to submit a synopsis of every play and, if required, let the Authority’s representative read a synopsis and attend rehearsals of a play. Whenever I read the script of a controversial play, I insisted on knowing the name of the director for I was well aware that if, for instance, it included a lesbian scene Director A would treat it delicately whilst Director B would emphasise the sexual overtones.

It was not surprising that some of the way-out plays did not measure up to the West End box office standards of the ATV management. Val Parnell was tolerant and made few critical strictures but Lew Grade, who watched every play, would ring me up afterwards with his own forthright comments. His expletives about bad language were usually colourful. In return, I spared no blushes about the triteness and repetitiveness of the Palladium shows. Our disputes were short-lived and when we met on the following day the rows were forgotten and we resumed our normal cheerful relationship, interrupted only by the endless arguments about how much ABC paid ATV.

When Val Parnell retired from ATV, in his seventies, there was some speculation about his successor, but Lew Grade was elected managing director with the full backing of the theatre interests and of the Mirror group. There was a further decline in Norman Collins’ influence and his role became little more than that of a highly placed public relations director. It seemed a waste of a brilliant executive who could have established a much-needed reputation for ATV in current affairs programmes, but instead the company concentrated all the more on sheer entertainment.

One course Norman Collins and I did pursue together was the steering of ITV into adult education. Already ITV had led the way in schools television, with Rediffusion’s Managing Director Paul Adorian pioneering this new development in the use of television. The week-end contracts eliminated ABC from schools television but Norman Collins and I waged a tireless campaign to introduce adult education on Sunday mornings, when church services provided the only broadcasts. It took us many years until, with the aid of Lord Eccles, and with the support of the WEA, we won through and were granted government permission to have extra hours on Sunday mornings. I invited Asa Briggs to be ABCs advisor on adult education, but before long the Authority asked if he could take over a similar role for them on a national basis.

When we began the broadcasts, in January 1963, our first two ABC series were very basic: how to speak good English and how to write a letter, with popular titles such as You Don’t Say, and Pen to Paper. ATV’s efforts in this field took the form of elementary lessons in French. ABC went on to Clear Thinking, explaining logic, and eventually First Steps in Physics, for which we produced not only a text book but an introductory science kit. Over the years we covered many subjects and co-operated with different publishers in the issue of paperback books related to our subjects. These grew broader in their range, varying from The Law is Yours and A Plain Man’s Guide to his Money to Psychology for Everyman and Anatomy of First Aid. Some of these became bestsellers, especially Philip Harben’s The Grammar of Cookery, published by Penguin, which sold 250,000 copies.

Article source: With an Independent Air by Howard Thomas (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977)

]]>http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-network-scrapes/feed/070Breaking into Sundayshttp://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-breaking-into-sundays/
http://abcatlarge.co.uk/with-an-independent-air-breaking-into-sundays/#respondThu, 28 Jul 2016 14:09:31 +0000http://abcatlarge.co.uk/?p=73ABC’s achievement on Sundays, though, was to prise open the ‘closed period’ at 6.15-7.00 p.m., when all television was off the air. Originally the Government’s official hours of broadcasting forbade transmission between 6.15 and 7.30 p.m. on Sundays because religious interests had claimed that television would reduce church attendance, but after a time BBC and ITV were permitted to broadcast programmes of serious discussions on religious themes from 7.00 to 7.30.

Every hour was precious to ABC on Sundays and I set out to devise a programme with religious content which would cater for the millions of young people who were at home between 6.15 and 7.00. The challenge was to make religion interesting and informative to teenagers and my mind went back to my own upbringing in Monmouthshire. My father was superintendent of the Congregational Sunday School and in addition to the ordinary services there was a free-and-easy meeting between teachers and young people described as PSA (Pleasant Sunday Afternoon).

This was to be my formula for a place and an occasion when people could meet and talk and socialise with Christian speakers. I decided to start a television youth club, with a six-piece band, singers and lively talk, including guests ranging from sportsmen and pop singers to archbishops.

First I had to convince the Authority and afterwards CRAC (Christian Religious Advisory Committee). I found the Committee particularly receptive because they had appreciated by now that commercial television had tackled religious subjects in earnest, and our professional techniques applied to the religious message were attracting audiences far outnumbering church attendances. The Authority was more hesitant, but it was decided that if I could satisfy their new member they would give their support. This was Diana Reader Harris, the headmistress of Sherborne School for Girls, no stranger to me because both my daughters had been educated at her school. After full discussion she was in complete agreement with my objectives and my proposals for producing the programmes.

The youth club had to be authentic and I engaged Penry Jones, trained in the Iona Community and running a Glasgow youth club, to join us in Manchester, and start up in March 1958 a young people’s club in the studio. For the title I lifted the description Bernard Sendall of the ITA had always used in the minutes of the SCC meetings where I had begun my campaign, Sunday Break.

The concept appealed to the clergy and we had enthusiastic support at all levels, especially from the late Cardinal Heenan, then at the new Liverpool Cathedral, who came over to our Manchester studios regularly for his chats with teenagers, always impromptu and with no subjects barred. The relaxed and carefree atmosphere of the programme, together with the frank discussions on all aspects of religion and morals, was something new in religious broadcasting and Sunday Break attracted a regular audience which has never been exceeded in size. The most memorable programme was a pop music version of the crucifixion, A Man Dies. This had been written and produced for a public performance in Bristol by a local church youth club and when I played over the sound recordings I decided to devote the whole forty-five minutes of Sunday Break to it.

As soon as we announced the decision there were outcries of protests at such blasphemy. This began in the press, spread to the House of Commons, and was echoed at the meetings of the Authority and by my own Board. Because I had read the text and heard the recordings, I was fully aware of its deep sincerity and religious mood, and felt I was on sure ground in resisting those who were criticising something they had not seen. On the Sunday morning a few hours before the 6.15 broadcast I had a complete dress rehearsal of the programme relayed to London, where the programme was viewed, in separate buildings, by the Authority and by my Board. After the closed circuit transmission Sir Robert Fraser telephoned me at Birmingham and told me with much feeling that everyone had been very moved by what they had seen and of course there could be no objection. The message from my Board too was equally heartening. Finally, A Man Dies was a remarkable success and had to be repeated. Gramophone recordings were made and sold, and we printed complete versions of the script and songs for the youth clubs and religious groups throughout Britain anxious to stage their own versions. In many ways A Man Dies was television’s predecessor of the stage and film musical versions of the story of Jesus Christ.

ABC continued to study the specialised needs of its Sunday audience. We made an interesting experiment with children’s programmes to find out reactions to series of half-hour science fiction serials. I had asked Sydney Newman if his drama department could produce these programmes for children, and their range stretched from Valley of the Monsters to Pathfinders to Venus. However, many parents, critics and ITA representatives had expressed concern to the effect that such entertainment might disturb children. As so little practical research was available I asked our children’s programme consultant, Mary Field, if she would work on this with Professor Arnold Lloyd, Head of the Department of Education at Cambridge. I remembered the infrared photograph Mary Field had taken at children’s Saturday morning film shows to capture their reactions. We decided to apply a similar method to television viewing. It was impractical to put film or television cameras into an ordinary home to record children’s normal responses, so we decided the next best method was to reconstruct a home in a studio and hope that children would behave naturally even though in a contrived situation.

ABC cameras in Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral

With the co-operation of the Middlesex Education Authority three boys and five girls (three aged ten and five aged thirteen) were invited on a Saturday afternoon to the ABC studios at Teddington, ostensibly for a demonstration of a television camera. Whilst one group toured the premises the others were asked to wait their turn and sit in a small studio, where they could spend the time watching a recorded programme.

I quote from Sydney Newman’s observations, written for an illustrated booklet we published at the time on the experiment:

‘What a humiliating, funny, illuminating and humble-making experience this experiment on children’s reactions was for us, the makers of this programme. For about eighteen of the twenty-five minutes of the running time the thirteen-year-old test group paid no attention to the programme whatsoever! To what we thought was terrifying footage of primeval monsters trying to kill one another, a ten-year-old exclaimed, “Oh, they’re models!” However, we learnt many things.’

The footnote to this was that we were then considering a proposed programme called Dr Who. But we came to the conclusion that the Authority would never allow us to broadcast it. When Sydney Newman joined the BBC he took Dr Who with him.

Article source: With an Independent Air by Howard Thomas (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977)